Yesterday, Arne Duncan responded to the National Day of Blogging for Real Education Reform. Since most of the national discussion seems to exclude voices of teachers, I was interested in this:
If you’re curious about how the Obama administration’s Blueprint for Reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) proposes to empower educators, check out our “Built for Teachers” brochure at ED.gov. It was written by teachers, for teachers.
Two months ago, education reform was at the center of discussion. The documentary “Waiting for Superman” was creating a stir. NBC hosted “Education Nation.” A spirited debate was on – perhaps not in the traditional media, but at least in many forums around the Web. Many were inspired by the discussions. Others were outraged at the one-sidedness of the discussion. Many of us saw that the teacher’s voice was missing – marginalized and often maligned. We saw that the rhetoric often missed the underlying issues.
A week or two after Education Nation, I had the opportunity to travel to Cairo, Egypt. As I was preparing, I was struck by how little I really knew about Cairo and the Middle East. I was a bit worried, I did not want to be the stereotypical “ugly American” tourist. I didn’t know the customs. I didn’t know what to expect. I was traveling alone and didn’t know the language. I was culturally illiterate. I quickly learned that I did not have much to fear. My taxi driver from the airport spoke English fluently. He also spoke Arabic, Spanish, some German and French and was learning Japanese. A few days later, I was able to hold a conversation, in English, with a group of children outside of an Egyptian school. They wanted to know where I was from (then knew that Chicago was in the center of the country)…and if I liked President Obama. Later, I was able to communicate with a 10 year old boy selling pastries – about $0.04 each – on a street corner next to a bustling open air market. No, it wasn’t a surprise, that they knew English. However, it was a strong reminder that, in the rest of the world, it isn’t impressive when someone can speak three or four languages. Are our students ready for this?
I was in Cairo for a meeting of International science educators planning for a virtual science fair. They were not any more passionate than many of the science teachers I know in the United States, instead what struck me was their ability to act on their passion. They had the authority to make curriculum changes and the technical infrastructure (far from perfect) and support to collaborate with schools from Barcelona to Katmandu. As I listened to them about their schools and the differences in cultures, I was amazed at the opportunities that many of their students had…and dismayed by the shallow “reform” discussions taking place a half a world away. These teachers did have tensions related to standards and testing, but it was not central to our discussions, as it almost always is in the United States.
When I returned, I found that the discussion started by Education Nation was basically over. A few were still talking about it, but the urgency displayed a few short weeks earlier had, with the exception of a few op-eds, disappeared.
This past Sunday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman penned another Op-Ed about the need for reform and, once again, the need for getting better teachers.
If you need a slew of anecdotes and statistics about how “bad” our system is, go ahead and read the column. I don’t think they need to be repeated here. If there is anyone left thinking that things do not need to change, they are simply not paying attention. Pick any metric and we are probably behind. I do not need to harp on the “woes” of our education system. However, I think we do need additional clarity on solutions.
Friedman includes this quote from Secretary Duncan:
“Other folks have passed us by, and we’re paying a huge price for that economically,” added Duncan in an interview. “Incremental change isn’t going to get us where we need to go. We’ve got to be much more ambitious. We’ve got to be disruptive. You can’t keep doing the same stuff and expect different results.”
I agree that we need “disruptive” change, but it has to be incremental – it will take time. The “high-performing” countries (Finland, South Korea, Singapore, etc) have been investing in coherent reforms for over 30 years. We can learn from them in order to accelerate reform here, but, slogans aside, we can’t Race to the Top in a few years. Duncan says, “You can’t keep doing the same stuff and expect different results.” Very true – we have been focused on standards and standardized testing for two decades and “increased accountability” for nearly a decade. Let’s think differently.
We need to focus on three key areas – equity, teacher professional growth, and a curricular shift away from defining rigor as breadth instead of depth. I’ll tackle equity now and the rest in future posts.
Focus on Equity
On YouTube, you can find many shocking videos that show the inequality between schools in poor communities and schools in more affluent communities. In one video a student in an affluent school states, “Here is my school’s observatory,” while a student from a poor school explains, “Our teachers buy all of their own school supplies.”
In Oprah’s Trading Schools episode a suburban student is showing off her school to a group of students from an inner-city Chicago school and is surprised by their reaction to the school’s health facilities. She asks, “Do you guys not have a cardio room?”
Perhaps the legacy of NBC’s Education Nation is their new reality show, “School Pride.” The commercial begins with images of a bug infested, dilapidated building with the text, “this is not an abandoned building; this is not a correctional facility; this is a real school.”
In the episode, an army of designers and contractors renovates a poor school in Compton. The community celebrates during the reveal as administrators, teachers and students cry because they have a nice place to learn.
We have turned inequity into entertainment. We feel good because these poor kids have something nice…instead of being outraged that the inequality existed in the first place.
We can not begin to think about improving education until we fix inequalities in school funding.
In a discussion about state-level school funding, Bob Peterson, a 5th grade teacher in Milwaukee (WI) wrote, “If the students in my fifth grade classroom on Milwaukee’s north side were born two miles farther north, several thousand dollars more per student per year would be spent on their education. Thanks to recent budget cuts my students have no gym teacher, no music teacher, and no paraprofessionals. That’s not the case with students in the schools two miles north.”
In a Newsweek article, Linda Darling Hammond explains,
We have 22 percent of our kids in poverty—the highest proportion of any industrialized country. Our schools have to make up for all of that, including the large achievement gap that kids have when they come to school from low-income families and haven’t had preschool education.
…they [high performing countries] spend their money equally on schools, sometimes with additional money to the schools serving high-need students. We take kids who have the least access to educational opportunities at home and we typically give them the least access to educational opportunities at school as well. We have the most unequal spread of achievement of any industrialized country except for Germany.
In a recent study, Is School Funding Fair, researchers at the Education Law Center compared state funding of schools across all 50 states. They found that only 11 states provide significantly more (at least 10%) per-student funding to high poverty schools than to more affluent schools, while funding formulas in 25 states provide more money to more affluent schools than to those in high poverty areas.
The solution is easy, but politically very difficult. It requires changes to state school funding formulas. Proposals to do this have been unveiled in states like Rhode Island and Wisconsin. If we want education reform that serves all students, we need to begin by advocating for equity. We need to speak up and demand progressive state funding formulas.
It isn’t sexy, but without it, other reform efforts are destined to fail.
Alfie Kohn was on Wisconsin Public Radio this morning talking about education reform and the lack of honest discussions about education in the U.S. It was a fantastic discussion and you really should listen to the entire show here (He takes a caller to task for supporting Michelle Rhee at the 14:30 mark).
I asked the following question (22:30 mark):
NBC is hosting “Education Nation” next week with 11 panels focused on education. Only one of the panelists has a view different than the dominant perspective on school reform. The voice of parents and teachers are completely missing. While looking at the panels, I was appalled by one… “How do we keep good teachers, throw out bad ones, and put a new shine on the profession?”
I assume that this will become a union bashing session.
(1) Why would high-quality prospective teachers want to teach in an environment like this?
(2) Is it possible to have meaningful reform without putting support for teachers at the center? How did “high performing countries” get to where they are by supporting teacher professional growth?
Thanks
Kohn’s response:
Right. Second point raises an interesting…even when you look at International test scores for what they are worth you find that the countries that tend to do very, very well and are impressive by that nature, like Finland have a complete different approach to education. They value teachers as professionals. They don’t give much homework. They rarely give standardized tests. They start the kids in school at age 7 instead of this drilling little kids and so on. That’s interesting.
But the first question he asks about attracting teachers is a very important element of this. In all of the tough, macho talk about rooting out bad teachers and keeping them accountable not only are we …as a professor put it in the NYT op-ed yesterday… not only are we missing what really maters but we end up with a situation where: (A) we protect bad teachers as - she [NYT Op Ed] put it - by hiding their lack of skill behind narrow goals and rigid scripts so that really bad teachers are often good at raising test scores and really terrific teachers often aren’t good at raising test scores because they are doing stuff that matters more; and (B) we make it much less likely that really talented young people will choose education as a career. Because they know they are being turned into test prep technicians and who can blame them for not wanting to do that.
“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson.
With this quote, Thomas Friedman sums up the problem with U.S. education in his 9/11 column, We’re No. 1(1)! Friedman’s hook is that the U.S. ranks number 11 in Newsweek’s list of the top 100 countries to live in (perhaps he should be using education rankings - 35th in math & 29th in science - instead of quality of life).
Friedman notes that, unlike the “Greatest Generation,” the “Baby Boomers” are facing incremental challenges and failing to rise to the occasion…why?
So much of today’s debate between the two parties, notes David Rothkopf, a Carnegie Endowment visiting scholar, “is about assigning blame rather than assuming responsibility. It’s a contest to see who can give away more at precisely the time they should be asking more of the American people.”
There is some truth to this, but I don’t think it is quite right. The thing that politicians need to ask is for more patience. The American public has the attention span of a 3 year old. With constant access to information and a standard of living that allows us to move from one stimulus to another, we demand quick fixes. Yet, our most pressing problems have no quick fixes. We can’t just “race to the top” to fix education.
Friedman decries this need to place blame and wants us to “ask more” of ourselves. As he enters into the education reform debate, he seems to want to move us past blaming “bad teachers, weak principals, or selfish unions” — which is a good thing. Instead, we should…blame the students!
“The larger cause of failure is almost unmentionable: shrunken student motivation,” wrote Samuelson. “Students, after all, have to do the work. If they aren’t motivated, even capable teachers may fail. Motivation comes from many sources: curiosity and ambition; parental expectations; the desire to get into a ‘good’ college; inspiring or intimidating teachers; peer pressure. The unstated assumption of much school ‘reform’ is that if students aren’t motivated, it’s mainly the fault of schools and teachers.” Wrong, he said. “Motivation is weak because more students (of all races and economic classes, let it be added) don’t like school, don’t work hard and don’t do well. In a 2008 survey of public high school teachers, 21 percent judged student absenteeism a serious problem; 29 percent cited ‘student apathy.’ ”
Patience…and perhaps a bit of critical thinking should quickly debunk this. Kids haven’t liked school for as long as there have been schools. In a Washington Post Op-Ed this summer, Alfie Kohn wrote:
If the subject is kids and how they’re raised, it seems our culture has exactly one story to tell. Anyone who reads newspapers, magazines, or blogs — or attends dinner parties — will already know it by heart: Parents today, we’re informed, either can’t or won’t set limits for their children. Instead of disciplining them, they coddle and dote and bend over backward to shield them from frustration and protect their self-esteem. The result is that we’re raising a generation of undisciplined narcissists who expect everything to go their way, and it won’t be pretty — for them or for our society — when their sense of entitlement finally crashes into the unforgiving real world.
He continues by citing numerous examples from the popular press about kids’ lack of motivation. Then, the zinger:
Powerful stuff. Except now that I think about it, those three indictments may not offer the best argument against today’s parents and their offspring. That’s because they were published in 1962, 1944, and 1911, respectively.
The revelation that people were saying almost exactly the same things a century ago ought to make us stop talking in mid-sentence and sit down – hard. In fact, the more carefully we look at the cranky-wistful conventional wisdom about how children are raised, the less there is to be said in its favor.
Patience…. For 30 years, federal education policy has been led by the U.S. Secretary of Education. For the last 30 years, the Secretary of Education has been a lawyer, coach, political theorist, or policy adviser…NOT someone with a strong connection to the realities of the classroom. Perhaps we should start listening to people that actually know something about classroom teaching. We have excluded educators from the reform discussion in favor of politicians and CEOs. It should be no surprise that in a society driven by “quick fixes,” we have had an incoherent education policy that focuses superficially on accountability via testing instead of tackling difficult issues. In an article for The Nation, Linda Darling-Hammond writes:
Also unlike high-achieving nations, we have failed to invest in the critical components of a high-quality education system. While we have been busy setting goals and targets for public schools and punishing the schools that fail to meet them, we have not invested in a highly trained, well-supported teaching force for all communities, as other nations have; we have not scaled up successful school designs so that they are sustained and widely available; and we have not pointed our schools at the critical higher-order thinking and performance skills needed in the twenty-first century. Some states are notable exceptions, but we have not, as a nation, undertaken the systemic reforms needed to maintain the standing we held forty years ago as the world’s unquestioned educational leader.
She continues by showing how long term investments in teacher preparation and curricula focused on problem solving instead of test-taking have driven reform in high-performing countries like Finland, Singapore, and North Korea. It took these countries 30 years to race to the top. Darling-Hammond adds:
The pace at which many nations in Asia and Europe are pouring resources into forward-looking systems that educate all their citizens to much higher levels is astonishing. And the growing gap between the United States and these nations—particularly in our most underfunded schools—is equally dramatic.
Unfortunately, the current “Race to the Top” reform efforts are pushing more of the same — investments in unproven charter schools, increased punishments for schools - and teachers - based on standardized testing, increased competition instead of collaboration between states, and other corporatist tinkering around the edges.
Instead of instilling fear in the public about the rise of other countries, bureaucratizing education with bean-counting policies, demoralizing educators through dubious accountability measures, homogenizing school curriculum, and turning children into test takes, we should inform the public about the possibilities brought about by globalization, encourage education innovations, inspire educators with genuine support, diversify and decentralize curriculum, and educate children as confident, unique, and well-rounded human beings.
In his op-ed, Friedman concludes that until we expect more of our parents and kids, we will remain Number 11. This is one more superficial answer from an “expert.” We need to do more than just ask more, we need to patiently enact long-term, coherent reforms. We should enact policies that invest in recruiting and keeping high-quality teachers in our most challenging schools. We should enact policies that treat teaching as a profession - policies that recognize teacher development as a career-long endeavor, not one that ends with certification. We need to implement policies that ensure equitable access to quality k-12 and post-secondary education. And, most importantly, we should enact policies that stop treating learning as an accumulation of testable facts and skills and start focusing on critical thinking, problem solving and creativity
Update via @RosenbaumSteve — As clearly shown by the ONN (NSFW), Friedman is right.
The journal Nature published a fantastic editorial about the growing trend towards denying science in the U.S. The last two paragraphs of the editorial, Science Scorned, are very powerful-
US citizens face economic problems that are all too real, and the country’s future crucially depends on education, science and technology as it faces increasing competition from China and other emerging science powers. Last month’s recall of hundreds of millions of US eggs because of the risk of salmonella poisoning, and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, are timely reminders of why the US government needs to serve the people better by developing and enforcing improved science-based regulations. Yet the public often buys into anti-science, anti-regulation agendas that are orchestrated by business interests and their sponsored think tanks and front groups.
In the current poisoned political atmosphere, the defenders of science have few easy remedies. Reassuringly, polls continue to show that the overwhelming majority of the US public sees science as a force for good, and the anti-science rumblings may be ephemeral. As educators, scientists should redouble their efforts to promote rationalism, scholarship and critical thought among the young, and engage with both the media and politicians to help illuminate the pressing science-based issues of our time.
So, a few years ago, I was in LA to lead a workshop. My colleague and I came in a couple of days early to make sure everything was ready….it was, and we were getting bored. What better way to spend the afternoon than to walk down Venice Beach. As we were trying to decide what to do that night, some guy shoved some pamphlets in our hands. We took a look — free tickets to the taping of Comedy Central’s The Man Show (Starring Jimmy Kimmel & Adam Corolla). As if we needed any more incentive, the tickets included FREE BEER!
So, we went and it was mostly entertaining. It was pretty interesting to see how the show was made…and we got a couple of beers too. When we left, there was a group of pretty obnoxious people doing obnoxious things, obviously drunk. Only one problem…the FREE BEER was non-alcoholic! Yeah, so these idiots got drunk on N/A beer…definitely not from Wisconsin!
So, what is the point of this story?
Did you hear? Teenagers can get high on the Internet for free.
The web was bombarded today with stories about teenagers finding a new way to get high….with “music.” It is called I-Dosing and it is all the rage (well, at least in Oklahoma).
At least, that’s what Oklahoma News 9 is reporting about a phenomenon called “i-dosing,” which involves finding an online dealer who can hook you up with “digital drugs” that get you high through your headphones.
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“Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about and it can lead them to other places,” Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs spokesman Mark Woodward told News 9.
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Oklahoma’s Mustang Public School district isn’t taking the threat lightly, and sent out a letter to parents warning them of the new craze. The educators have gone so far as to ban iPods at school, in hopes of preventing honor students from becoming cyber-drug fiends, News 9 reports.
Better be careful, or your kids might end up like this:
If it sounds too crazy too be true…because it is. It didn’t take much digging to find that I-dosing is a bunk. It is just a new way to separate teenagers from disposable income…while letting them feel like they are getting away with something.
In 1839, Heinrich Wilhelm Dove discovered that two constant tones, played at slightly different frequencies in each ear, cause the listener to perceive the sound of a fast-paced beat. Calling this phenomenon “binaural beats,” Dove helped launch two centuries of legitimate research and, as is almost always followed by exciting empirical study, money-grabbing pseudoscience.
First, the facts: Binaural beat therapy has been used in clinical settings to research hearing and sleep cycles, to induce various brain wave states, and treat anxiety.
But there are more controversial (dare I say dubious?) claims associated with binaural beats: Increased dopamine and beta-endorphin production, faster learning rates, improved sleep cycles, and yes, if you dig around less scientific communities like, oh, MySpace, you’ll find kids telling each other that “dude, those beats get you like totally high.”
If you’ve wandered through a Brookstone or Sharper Image store in your local shopping mall and noticed sleep therapy or “brain-controller” devices for sale, that’s just an upper middle class, “I need to stop thinking about my 401(k)” version of the same digital drug that the new crop of seedy i-dosing websites are offering to teens.
However, the parents shouldn’t worry, as the music almost certainly does not cause a high, or encourage future drug use, said Harriet de Wit, the principle investigator of the University of Chicago’s human behavioral pharmacology lab.
Although experiments show that the expectation of getting high can enhance the symptoms associated with drugs, even when someone takes a placebo instead, no sound or music could trigger the exact pathways activated by specific drugs like PCP or Quaaludes, de Wit said.
Yeah, so just like those folks getting drunk on N/A beer, these kids are getting stoned on music. It isn’t happening…not even on Venice Beach.
If you have ever been to an education conference, you will probably agree that a lot of the best learning comes from the discussions between sessions, dinner, or at other “unscripted” times when you have the opportunity to share with other passionate professionals. We need these types of interactions to keep moving our craft forward.
#scichat provides a way for scientists and educators to engage in an ongoing discussion with the goal of sharing ideas, growing professionally and improving the teaching of science. This “hashtag” can be used at any time to share your thoughts or resources with other science educators. However, the real power of #scichat is to develop a community through real-time events every other Tuesday night (9:00 Eastern). The topic for each event will usually be selected in advance by the community.
Last week, educators from around the world participated in the first #scichat on Twitter. Participants shared ideas on how to increase the relevancy of school science. The discussion ranged from the role of textbooks, to discipline integration, to the incorporation of authentic projects and real-world events. A few of the participants took steps to collaborate on a project to have their students analyze TED videos this fall. A full transcript is available here.
Join us for the next #scichat! Use the Twtpoll or suggest a future topic in the comment section below.
Last week, I observed a discussion on Twitter related to Dan Pink’s new book, Driven: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.In this book, Pink reviews the psychological research related to motivation and applies it to business.On one side of the discussion, educators were excited about what we can learn about education from this book.On the other side was a strong critique of using business books to inform educational practice.
Pink’s Drive isn’t released (on Amazon, at least) yet, but this Ted Talk should give you a taste. (UPDATE: You can also read an interview with Public School Insights here.)
Pink states, “There is a mismatch between what science knows, and what business does.” The reward and punishment approach works for mechanistic “20th Century tasks.”However, it doesn’t work for cognitively intense “21st Century tasks.”This same statement is true in the classroom too.Extrinsic motivators and incentives may work to keep kids quiet, to keep them in their seats, and to compel them to memorize spelling lists and fact tables, but it builds a culture that trivializes learning.However, do we really need to wait for Dan Pink’s business book to tell us this?
Dan Pink is an engaging communicator and can present a well-crafted argument. He is adept at “popularizing” research. It is OK to read his book, but don’t forget - there are folks in education, experts even, that have already compellingly made this argument.
For example-
Alfie Kohn wrote about this nearly 20 years ago in the book Punished by Rewards.
In this groundbreaking book, Alfie Kohn shows that while manipulating people with incentives seems to work in the short run, it is a strategy that ultimately fails and even does lasting harm. Our workplaces and classrooms will continue to decline, he argues, until we begin to question our reliance on a theory of motivation derived from laboratory animals.
Drawing from hundreds of studies, Kohn demonstrates that people actually do inferior work when they are enticed with money, grades, or other incentives. Programs that use rewards to change people’s behavior are similarly ineffective over the long run. Promising goodies to children for good behavior can never produce anything more than temporary obedience. In fact, the more we use artificial inducements to motivate people, the more they lose interest in what we’re bribing them to do. Rewards turn play into work, and work into drudgery.
Here is one of many examples from the research literature of mastery versus performance orientations and the impact on learning in science:
Pintrich and Sinatra (2003) state that a classroom environment that focuses on promoting mastery goals and dialogue for understanding is critical for learning to occur. The authors found that students hold one of two goals related to school achievement. Students that hold mastery goals focus on learning and understanding content. Students with performance goals focus on demonstrating their ability in comparison to other students. The researchers conclude that students who reported a focus on understanding as their primary goal orientation showed the greatest gains in conceptual understanding.
The students were actively engaged in activities and had an improved understanding of the concepts after the lessons. Students at the University of Michigan who endorsed mastery goal orientations showed a greater gain in their understanding of Newtonian physics than those students who did not endorse mastery goals. Students who espouse performance goals and do not endorse mastery goals show little or no improvement in conceptual understanding. In fact, performance goals without mastery goals have at best no effect on conceptual change, or may even hinder conceptual change. Mastery goals are promoted in contexts where the teachers emphasize learning and create situations where students can make choices and feel autonomous. Recognizing students for improvement can also help promote the adoption of mastery goals. Performance goals are promoted in contexts where teachers use normative grading and recognize students for their performance relative to others.
Dan Pink’s book is based on a wide body of research that has already been published.The premise of the book is that extrinsic motivators do not work for cognitively demanding tasks.That conclusion should be a ‘no-brainer’ for educators as it has been one of the pillars of progressive thinking for decades.But, instead of saying, “Well, duh!” educators will rush out (or online) to spend $20 to read how this applies to business. What is the allure of books like A Whole New Mind, and Drive?Why do we need business “experts” to tell us what we should already know?
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Pintrich, P. R. & Sinatra, G.M. (2003) The role of Intentions in conceptual change learning. In G. M. Sinatra & P. R. Pintrich (Eds.), Intentional Conceptual Change. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
To celebrate the beginning of the second week of the “brokenhagen” climate change socialist fest, I thought it would be a good time for me to reinforce the climate denier manifesto. Taking these 16 statements to heart will serve you well as you join forces with Lord Monckton and Senator Inhofe to obfuscate and vociferate about the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on humankind.
If you doubt the need to join us in this effort, remember Obama’s fascist EPA wants to make it illegal for you to breathe.
A Climate Change Denier Manifesto:
A spectre is haunting the world - the spectre of global warming. All the powers of the world, in the name of a one world government, have entered into an unholy alliance to exorcise this false spectre.
Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of “climate change?”
To this end, wingnuts of various nationalities have assembled in Copenhagen and sketched the following manifesto, to be published in the English, French*, German*, Italian*, Flemish* and Danish* languages.
*Well, not really, since we don’t know them…and everyone should speak English anyway.
Below, we declare our principles and intentions:
I will confuse the scientific use of the word ‘theory’ with its casual meaning.
I will search the fringes of science for any instances of uncertainty and generalize it to all science.
I will ignore multiple sources of evidence in favor of a columnists’ unfounded claims.
I will bring up the 1970’s “global cooling” controversy, as proof that scientists are clueless even though more than six times as many research studies predicted warming.
I will find a single quote in thousands of pages of text that can be damning when used without context.
I will pick my comparison data from wherever I damn well please, even if it happens to be the hottest year ever.
I will pretend that scientists have ignored “natural cycles,” because I know the general public doesn’t have the time to read the dozens of studies debunking this claim.
I will make up facts and misrepresent data during interviews and op-eds because I know that journalists won’t call me on it.
I will deride “qualifications” as elitist.
I will repeat fabrications and falsehoods until they become perceived as the truth.
I will confound local weather with global climate because, well, it is too darn confusing.
When a scientists takes issue with my comments, I will accuse her of being dogmatic and stifling dissent.
I will claim that tens of thousands of scientists are in on the hoax so that they can cash in, while hiding my ties to big oil.
I will chastise scientists for being apocalyptic fear mongers while claiming that the solution to the non-problem will destroy life as we know it.
I will deny warming on even days and deny human impact on odd days.
I will shoot the messenger – He invented climate change AND the Internet.
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For an example of our manifesto in action, please read this, exclusive commentary. The author should be commended for integrating 13 of our 16 principles.
… The collectivist Left in academia, media and politics got away with imprinting this dogma on the popular mind only because generations of government-school graduates have been successfully stripped of knowledge of history, geology or climate science. There was a time when “science” was a rigorous search for truth that required an open skeptical mind, double-blind studies, multiple repeated experiments, peer-reviewed published data and a strong belief that if you are proven wrong, someone else got it right and the world will benefit. This approach was good enough for Pasteur, Newton and Ben Franklin, but not for today’s crowd.
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…The real story here cannot be so easily buried. Climate-change prophets threaten millions with poverty if their schemes become law. A preview can be seen in the “man-made dust bowl” of Central California where water has been cut off to one of the most fertile and productive agricultural areas on Earth to “protect” a small fish that one judge thinks might be harmed if the water was used to grow food.
Who cares that those small fish are food for the salmon that west coast fishermen rely on? I’m with the farmers…for whom do you stand?
P.S. Seriously, Polar Bears? Is that the best they can do? Don’t they know that polar bears eat baby seals?
One of the most famous quotes in the history of spaceflight is “Failure is not an Option,” by Gene Kranz, Lead Flight Director during Apollo 13. OF course, he was correct - NASA couldn’t afford to fail when lives were on the line. This quote also shows up as the title of an education book. Over the years, I have seen the quote in many science classrooms across the country. Is this really the message that we want to send our students? As former Packer quarterback Jim McMahn said, “…risk taking is inherently failure prone. Otherwise, it would be called sure-thing-taking. Would NASA ever have gotten off the ground if tens of thousands of people, from politicians to engineers to astronauts were not willing to take risks?
In order to learn, we need to take risks. We need to push beyond our comfort zone. Too many of our students are so worried about counting points that they are afraid to do anything original - they are afraid to take risks because they are afraid to fail.
Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University said, “The core skill of an innovator is error recovery, not failure avoidance.” We could easily re-write this quote to say, “The core skill of a learner is error recovery, not failure avoidance.”
What would have happened to the people in this video if they would have avoided future failures instead of recovering?
